Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is the pub­lisher of Geist and author of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World. He is a recip­i­ent of the Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing, the CBC Literary Award for Creative Non-fiction (for “Girl Afraid of Haystacks”), the National Magazine Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Western Magazine Award for Lifetime Achievement. He founded Pulp Press Book Publishers (now Arsenal Pulp Press) in 1971. His web­site is: waysofpublishing.com.

Dispatches by Stephen Osborne in recent issues of Geist:

Cat in the House
The Tall Women of Toronto
The Future is Uncertain Country
Signs and Portents
Sleight of Hand
The Orwell Effect
Intellectual In the Landscape
Exotic World
Hospitals of the Mind
Stories of  a Lynching

Girl Afraid of Haystacks, orig­i­nally pub­lished in a lim­ited print edi­tion,  is now avail­able in this dig­i­tal edition:

Stephen Osborne on Geist.com

Defining Moments

The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment,  a you moment, a me moment …

David Thompson Beats the Devil on the Kisiskatchewan River

Thompson’s free-ranging nar­ra­tive of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at check­ers.
 

Photo: Parade of Lost Souls, Mandelbrot

Halloween Capital of America

The Devil came to land on the shores of Massachusetts 400 years ago, and he thrives in America today.

Photo by Mandelbrot

The Tall Women of Toronto

In this city of tall build­ings, the most impos­ing shad­ows are cast by women.

The Future Is Uncertain Country

As men of high seri­ous­ness appear on tele­vi­sion with their crys­tal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.

Signs and Portents

Mr. C.F. Keiss, a wealthy American visitor from Bucyrus, Ohio, met death with “tragic suddenness” under the wheels of the new City auto ambulance at the corner of Pender and Granville Streets yesterday afternoon.

The Orwell Effect

In the last week of June 1978, I fell into an argument about George Orwell a few days after my photograph appeared in the Globe and Mail next to a photograph of Anne Murray, the singer-sweetheart of the nation.

Sleight of Hand

For a few days in June, when the gloom lifted briefly, it was possible to stroll through Vancouver in sunlight, which is what cities are meant for: to steal away and plunge into them, into the pedestrian flow, to dawdle along, to offer oneself to the passing scene.

Chiquita Canáda

Last month we had a visit from Eliz­abeth Anderson, who hails from Min­neapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state univer­sity. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader. We wanted immediately to know what there is about Canada that might constitute an object of study.

Intellectual in the Landscape

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

Blue Moon

We look back and so much of the past seems to portend what would come later. The man in the seat in front of me on the Greyhound bus was returning to Edmonton from his annual vacation in Las Vegas, where in the off-season you can get a cheap room with everything you need, colour tv, air conditioning, room service, no windows, but who needs windows in Las Vegas?

Exotic World

In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenirs from the hundred destinations listed on decorative signs in the museum, such as one near the door reading: “New Guinea, Borneo, Africa, Thailand, South America, archeological sites, Machu Picchu Peru, pagan Burma, the Nile Egypt, Abu Simbel.”

Rocking Santa by Matti Mattila

Snows of Yesteryear

We left town two days before Christmas, in a bus, at night, as the city filled up with snow

Hospitals of the Mind

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in New Westminster, B.C., taken around the time that Esson­dale opened in 1913.

Writing Life

He said the only car you could drive in those days no matter how drunk you were was a Volkswagen Beetle with a broken heater, and he had never seen a Volkswagen with a heater that worked.

The Lost Art of Waving

Some time ago, when she was four years old, or per­haps four and a half, which is a sep­a­rate age at that time of life, my youngest pro­tégé, whose name is Julia, observed that not many peo­ple seemed to know how to wave properly.

The Man Who Stole Christmas

On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.

The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

The Unremembered Man

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

Virtual City

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages, a harmless enough question that might be asked in either official language, but only in Ottawa would anyone try to answer it, without irony and in both languages at once; for the conversation, which was taking place in the Museum of Civilization, was relentlessly, touchingly bilingual, with no translation provided.

War Stories

A ques­tion of some con­cern among my friends when we were grow­ing up in the fifties and six­ties was how old you had to be to go to war.

Stranger

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

Strong Man

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

https://webspace.utexas.edu/cokerwr/www/index.html/coincidence.shtml

The Coincidence Problem

I was walking down the street thinking about a friend I hadn’t seen for some time, and when I looked up, there was my friend standing at the corner with his wife and he was looking at me in some surprise, for as it turned out they had been speaking of me in the same moment that I had been thinking of him, and so we congratulated ourselves on having arrived there at the corner at just the right moment for these facts to be revealed to us.

The Contest of Memory

“In Flanders Fields” was com­posed in 1915 on a bat­tle­field in Belgium, after the death of a young lieu­tenant who was blown up by an incom­ing shell.

Stories of a Lynching

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the custody of Thomas York, who owned the farm, and a neighbour who was staying overnight.

Road King

This story begins with a young woman named Anne Marie, who turned nineteen the day her New York uncle rolled into Kamloops on the Harley-Davidson and pulled up at the espresso joint where Anne Marie and her boyfriend were drinking iced cappuccinos on the patio.

Other City, Big City

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”

Lowbrow Lit

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.

Memory of Fire

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.

Hiatus

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

Iceman

 

 

Julia’s World

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Grinkus and Pepper

They were not useful, they were not hearty: theirs was the peripatetic life of the mind, a clear contradiction of the Presbyterianism of the world of learning, of the work ethic and the fraternities and sororities and football games and heartiness that constituted its alibi.

Evictions

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.

First Time, Last Time

The first time I stayed at the Marlborough Hotel in Winnipeg, I lost several rounds of Scrabble in the bar to an editor from Vancouver, while a trio of incompetent musicians thumped and crashed away on the bandstand, and no matter how much we drank neither of us could come up with a single exhilarating word.

A Friend Moves Away

A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.

A River Gets Big

A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.”

A Sporting Life

A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.

Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Lions Gate

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene that attracted him so powerfully, pitched over the side of the bridge and plummeted sixty metres into the ocean below. What happened to the camera has not been recorded, but the falling man, during the few moments of his descent (which he would later calculate to have been about 2.5 seconds), was spotted by two lifeguards in an inflatable dinghy who were patrolling Third Beach, a swimming area about a mile along the shore from Lions Gate Bridge.

Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

The Great Game

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan. In great games, individuals exist on the same level as grains of silver in a photograph. In the extreme close-up, the integrity of the picture no longer holds, but we can appreciate the shape and features of individual crystals